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What are some of the larget Central Plants You have Seen??

This is a question for all those who work as building engineers or service larger equipment.

What are some of the largest Central Plants You have Seen, during your years in this industry?? More Specifically, what are some of the largest Central Plants for Comfort air conditioning. We all know that many factories/industrial facilities have large chiller systems, however the largest system specifically designed for comfort air conditioning was the former World Trade Center in NYC. That plant had 7- 7000 ton York Chillers. 49,000 tons of cooling capacity.

Has anybody here ever seen anything that can come close to this?? What was the tonnage?? What building was it in?? Were they doing cooling only, or did they also have heating (Boilers)??

I have a picture of the OSU chiller plant you're talking about as the wallpaper on my laptop. I've seen pictures of data centers with 20 York centrifugals lined up in a row.

Although we don't have anything that's WTC-big, down here in FL, you can throw a rock and hit a 7,000 ton chiller plant. One of the biggest ones I work at occasionally is a 13,000 ton plant for a local university that consists of a 1500t Trane CVHB, a 3000t Trane CDHF Duplex, (2) 2000t Carrier 17FAs, (1) 3000t York Turbomaster, and (2) 750t York YTs. They have numerous other smaller plants with Trane Duplexes in the 7,500 to 8,000 ton range.

The hospital I work at has got about 8000 tons, but its situated in two different plants. Probably going to be downsized in the next year or so though, removing a couple 750T tranes and replacing them with a single 950T.

Kennedy Airport has the largest absorber chiller plant around also handled by York.WTC contract was a easy Million $ anually with a tech 40hrs on site from the day it was installed,and he retired the thursday before the attacks.

Dubai has three cooling plants of 35,000 tons, 28,000 tons and 42,000 tons respectively, and when the first phase of the project is completed in mid-2006, the system at total build-out will provide roughly 140,000 tons of refrigeration to cool 69 high rise towers currently under development at Jumeirah Lake Towers.

Mark Beiser saw the main chilled water plant for Indy's district cooling. I forgot what all he said was in there. The system has 2 more elsewhere.

I believe the WTC plant provided chilled water for both 110 story towers, the smaller buildings located in the complex, the train station, and the shopping mall. Despite the square footage that had to be cooled, I would bet that they still had quite a bit of redundancy. The plant used water from the Hudson River, as condenser water.

49,000 tons is VERY LARGE. How great of a tonnage is normally considered large?? 1000 tons?? 10,000 tons?? Etc

Thanks for sharing your experiences. It’s always great to hear about those HUGE systems!!

another interesting WTC area rebuild fact in 2012 is both 7WTC and the Freedom Tower are all self-contained water cooled VAV/VFD installs per floor maybe 4 per floor.no more chillers as before.they still pull in the Hudson River for the condensers.the original towers had a load of added on water cooled systems thru-out north and south towers using return chilled water with regulating valves to maintain the heads.working for Trane in '89 we had split air cooled chillers under contract just above that North Tower 86th floor elevator cross over area up the escalator off that lobby.no big tonnages but they were there just below where the first jet hit on 9/11